Driven by the need to heal, an idealistic young inventor builds a bizarre machine which he fuels with cornstarch. "If cornstarch can heal diaper rashes," he reasons, "then maybe it can heal the world's rashes." So he summons one person after another to his stately Brooklyn home, and they all desperately offer themselves to the odd-looking Gizmo. Appearing in sumptuous B&W, the film is a tribute to the theater of heightened emotion, at once displaying the effects of a world in desperate need of healing and the ludicrousness and impossibility of such healing.